Posts Tagged ‘verdict’

Blizzard’s über-RTS, StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty is finally here, with its sprawling single player, imposing multiplayer and grand narrative aspirations. Where does it succeed? Where does it stumble? Does it really need the two additional parts currently in development? Alec and Quinns met in the RPS saloon for a chat.

Alien Swarm is out! And free! A four-player co-op alien-shooting game. What better choice for a four-person blogging team to Verdict? Except that Kieron’s on a plane, and Alec’s locked in a cell deep underground. So it fell to Jim and John to dispense the only correct thoughts and opinions anyone should have. Thanks to Phill and John G. for making up our numbers. Read our thoughts on the game below.

This is something special. This isn’t just the small matter of being one of the best games of the year, it’s also the emergence of a stellar new talent in gaming. World Of Goo is so stunningly designed, so beautifully illustrated, so precisely programmed, and so completely adorable that any of the greatest development companies in the world would be proud to release it. That this is a tiny indie dev’s first release – it is beyond belief.

Small blobs of Goo, when put near one another, form rigid bonds. Connect enough of them together and you can build towers and bridges along which unconnected Goo can saunter. The goal in the majority of levels is to see particular balls of Goo reach a pipe opening, into which they are satisfactorily sucked. There’s your raw concept. Now apply four hundred million gallons of imagination.

This is not a review. It also isn’t a verdict, or a judgement, or a rating, or anything of the sort. WAR isn’t released yet, there’ll likely be a fair few changes in the final game, elements of it won’t be up and running properly until the servers are jam-packed, and without a doubt none of us have played enough of it to make a really definite judgement. Apart from Jim, who knows full well he won’t be playing it until they put some spaceships in.

What it is a discussion. We’ve been on the WAR closed beta for a few weeks now, and it’s certainly a game we’ve desperately wanted to talk about here. And not simply because we’re British, hence playing Warhammer is fairly synonymous with puberty for us. Also because, well, it’s potentially the most interesting MMO this year. Despite… ah, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s see what we’ve got to say…

Edit – a little context. The European closed beta differed significantly to the US closed beta in that players were split onto different servers dependent on their language. The net result was four fairly quiet servers instead of one busy one, and that mean the PvP/RvR elements of the game were barely operable. That’s why we don’t discuss ‘em as much as we do the PvE and Public Quests. If you think we shouldn’t be talking about the game at all given that, well, that’s your prerogative, but we disagree. We’re writing about what the game’s European publisher presented us with. Additionally, WAR is far from being just a PvP game – the PvE is substantial and omnipresent, and the reason many people want to play the game. And again – this is not a review. It’s just a cheerful, informal discussion of our experiences on the closed beta.

The fairytale story of how Portal came into being has all but entered into legend. A plucky group of Digipen paupers created a final year project, Narbacular Drop, that was shown at the annual Digipen event for visiting developers. The handsome princes at Valve saw it, and liked it. Valve invited the team to visit their castle and demo their concept. Before they were halfway through their presentation, they’d all been offered jobs by the king. And then a couple of years later, a beautiful baby Portal was born. And we all lived happily ever after.